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Alain Resnais (1922 -2014)

Resnais: one of the masters, one of the great formalists who knew that form is only an extension of content (& vice-versa). Never repeated himself. Every movie (even if you didn’t like it, or if it wasn’t your favorite Resnais) a completely realized work of art & specific to its needs & processes. And the filmography is vast from shorts to documentaries to “fiction.” Check it out here.

Coming to his work in the early sixties, for the young European I was, it felt more accurate, searching, valuable, explorative than 99% of the literature coming out of France in those years — & that doesn’t just apply to the best-known ones, i.e. Hiroshima mon amour (1959) & Last Year at Marienbad (1961) & their connections to the Nouveau Roman. Check out, for example, his collaborations with Chris Marker & Agnès Varda.

In 1960 he was a co-signer of the Manifesto of the 121, which protested against French colonial policy in Algeria. That war, and the difficulty of coming to terms with its horrors, was a central theme of his next film Muriel (1963), whose fractured narrative explored the mental states of its characters & was among the first French films to comment, even indirectly, on the Algerian experience.

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A quick question about Alain Resnais & Chris Marker’s Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die) – 1953 on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/embed/hzFeuiZKHcg
Since my pidgin French gets me only so far, what is it about this that it was banned for so long?

And if you need a Vietnam fix, Resnais’ and all the other directors parts of Loin du Vietnam certainly evince ‘nostalgia’.